Lopburi (, , ) is a province in the central region of Thailand. The province is divided into 11 administrative districts, and Mueang Lopburi district is the capital. With over 720,000 people, the province is Thailand's 31st largest area and 35th most populous. There are eight neighbouring provinces, Phetchabun, Chaiyaphum, Nakhon Ratchasima, Saraburi, Phra Nakhon Si Ayutthaya, Ang Thong, Sing Buri, and Nakhon Sawan.
Historic buildings, artefacts and prehistoric settlement sites are recorded across the province, among them the copper-working sites of the Khao Wong Prachan valley, where ore was processed from about 1500 BC. Lopburi was formerly Lavo, the seat of a kingdom of the Dvaravati period, and in the 17th century King Narai made it the second capital of Ayutthaya.
History
Prehistory Known as Lavo during much of its history, Lopburi probably dates to prehistoric times. An excavation at the foot of Khao Phra Ngam uncovered a burial ground with many skeletons, whose finds Sujit Wongthes reads as showing contact with the coast and the northeast.
The Khao Wong Prachan valley holds two sites of prehistoric copper production, Non Pa Wai and Nil Kham Haeng, where ore was processed from about 1500 BC. Vincent Pigott reported the slag heaps at Non Pa Wai in hundreds of thousands of tons. Work by Pigott with Surapol Natapintu and with Gerd Weisgerber identified the valley, and Phu Lon in the northeast, as the likely sources of the copper used in Thailand. At neither is there evidence of prehistoric mining until several centuries after the first bronze artefacts appear in Southeast Asia. Lead isotopes in slag and cast metal from Ban Non Wat on the Khorat Plateau have been matched to this valley's ores, which makes it a supplier to the northeast by about 1000 BC.
Miriam Stark summarises the survey evidence for the same region. Work in the Lopburi area reports a trend toward centralisation with satellite settlements, a marked increase in bronze working and the adoption of iron by about 500 BCE. Large moated sites there run from 7 to 50 hectares and are oval or circular. Many show either continuous occupation into the historic period or occupation broken and resumed between about 200 BCE and the turn of the era. Fragmentary remains of a single residential structure have been identified at Ban Tha Khae.
At Sap Champa the wall today averages 10 metres in height, and the moats there and at Ban Tha Khae were cut into drainage that already existed. Both sites have yielded indirect evidence of bronze working on site.
Dvaravati network Fiorella Rispoli, Roberto Ciarla and Vincent Pigott have set out a cultural sequence for the Lopburi region in which social complexity accelerates from the late first millennium BCE. Objects of Indian origin enter the record from about 200 CE, among them glass, carnelian and agate beads, terracotta ear ornaments and stone skin rubbers. The authors read the sequence as continuity rather than rupture, and place the transition to early statehood between the 3rd and the 6th centuries. About 20 km northeast of the town, the moated site of has been investigated by Thanik Lertcharnrit since 2004. It was occupied from the Bronze Age through to the Dvaravati period. A Dvaravati layer of the 6th to 9th centuries lies above an Iron Age layer assigned, on radiocarbon dates whose ranges vary widely, to 500 BCE–500 CE. Lertcharnrit states that there was no break in occupation between the two. Stephen A. Murphy takes both sequences as support for a transitional proto-Dvaravati phase in the 4th and 5th centuries.
Stark places the beginning of the central-place hierarchy of the Dvaravati period no earlier than about 500 CE. Karen Mudar's survey of the district found only a weak association between sites and wet-rice cultivation before that date, and suggests that dryland farming continued in much of the region.
The name Lavo originated from the capital city of Lavo kingdom, an ancient Mon kingdom of the Dvaravati period (6th–11th century CE).
Lopburi closes the eastern of two rows of ancient settlements that Phōngsi Wanasin and Thiwa Supcanya found above the 3.5-metre contour of the plain, running from Chainat through Inburi, Singburi and Phromburi. A Dvaravati-period inscription from Lopburi, K. 577, names an adhipati Ārjava, chief of the Taṅgura people, as the son of the īśvara of Śāmbuka. Mathias Jenny cites seventh-century Old Mon epigraphy from near Lopburi for the spellings kwel 'cart' and ḍek 'servant', which he takes to be the forms behind Thai kwiən 'ox cart' and dèk 'child'. Inscribed silver medallions reading śrī-dvāravatī-īśvara-puṇya are also recorded from this province, and from Nakhon Pathom, Ratchaburi, Suphan Buri, Sing Buri and Chai Nat. Most are chance finds of unknown provenance, many are in private collections, and forgeries have lately been noticed.
Two octagonal pillars from Sap Champa carry Pali inscriptions. The first, also in the Somdet Phra Narai National Museum, gives a verse on the knowledge of the four realities as the second of its four texts. The second has the form pavva[jitena], one of the early Pali spellings with a doubled v that also occur on the Phra Pathom Chedi wheel. A further account of an inscribed pillar from Sap Champa, held in the same museum, gives its text as excerpts of the Buddha's first sermon in Pali and its inventory number as LB 8. Richard Salomon and Nicolas Revire date it to the seventh or eighth century by its script, and note that the Fine Arts Department first published the inscription as Sanskrit. A floral mark dividing the text matches one on a shell-script pillar from Si Thep.
A small fragment of an inscribed stone wheel of the law from Wat Phra Si Ratana Mahathat is now in the Somdet Phra Narai National Museum. It has been published as a Lopburi object since Jean Boisselier described it in 1961. Eng Jin Ooi and Peter Skilling suspect instead that it belongs to the wheel found at Chai Nat in 1988 and was moved to Lopburi at an unknown date. They rest the suggestion on the shared felloe width of 19 centimetres, the near-identical floral design, the palaeography and the textual tradition, and on the absence of any recorded archaeological context or other wheel remains at Lopburi. Robert Brown and both editions of the Fine Arts Department's Inscriptions in Thailand treat it as a Lopburi find.
Glass beads from the province have been analysed for their composition. Saritpong Khunsong reports a sample of 186 beads from ten Dvaravati sites of the central plain, two of which are in Lopburi. The monument of Wat Pun, in Mueang Lopburi, yielded one of the five beads of Chinese lead glass in the sample. Phromthin Tai yielded potash glass and Middle Eastern plant-ash soda-lime glass. A gold-glass bead is reported from Phromthin Tai on Thanik Lertcharnrit and Alison Carter's account, together with a gold-imitation bead of a type made at Siraf, at Berenike in Egypt and at Thung Tuek in Phang-nga. Ban Tha Khae is named among the early find-places of gold-glass beads, with Mantai in Sri Lanka, Oc Eo and Kuala Selinsing.
Khmer influence and late Lavo Khmer builders raised many of the temples that stand in the city. Lopburi sent its own embassies to China in 1115 and 1155, which has been read as a period of independence. The weight those embassies carry rests on a convention of the field, which David K. Wyatt states as the assumption that a tribute mission to the Chinese court indicates independence, or a bid for it. The mission of 1155 changed a reading of the Dong Mae Nang Mueang inscription. George Cœdès had held that Lopburi lacked the standing to have the officers the inscription names, and assigned it to a king of Hariphunchai. He withdrew the objection in a footnote added while his article was in press, and in 1968 stated a preference for Lopburi.
A dated object survives from the early 13th century. Seven lines of Khmer cut on the back of a headless stone Buddha at Lopburi record its making in 1213 by one Candasvāratana, in the posture beneath the Nāga's hood, together with the planting of a pipal tree. Its reckoning of time is wholly Khmer, with no trace of the Tai system used six years later in the Phrae valley. David K. Wyatt reviewed the sixteen dated inscriptions of 1168 to 1219. He found no indication of Angkorian political or administrative power in those from Lopburi and Grahi, while Pracinburi and the Khorat Plateau remained within it, and added that the absence is not conclusive.
Lopburi was remembered as a place of study. The Mūlasāsanā names it with Ayojjhapura as a centre of learning in the early 14th century. The Annals of the North have Ngammueang and Ram Khamhaeng studying the arts there under one teacher in 1254, neither of them for ordination. The name Cāmbūka, which Cœdès connected with the city of Śambhūkapaṭṭana in the Preah Khan inscription of 1191, occurs on a Dvaravati-style Buddha recovered at Lopburi. On that evidence he placed the city no more precisely than in the Menam valley. Lavo went on sending its own missions to the Chinese court after 1289. Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit count four between 1289 and 1299, beside one from Phetchaburi in 1294.
Under Ayutthaya During the Ayutthaya period, King Ramathibodi I sent Phra Ramesuan (later King Ramesuan) as the Uparaja to reign in Lopburi. In 1666 King Narai the Great ordered a new palace built on the east bank of the Lopburi River and made Lopburi the second capital of the country, as Ayutthaya was threatened by the Dutch. After King Narai died, the city was almost abandoned and fell into ruin.
Modern history In 1856 King Mongkut of the Chakri dynasty ordered King Narai's palace to be renovated. In 1937 Field Marshal Plaek Phibunsongkhram chose Lopburi for the largest military base in Thailand, and it was at one time intended to become the country's new capital after the end of World War II.
Geography Lopburi is on the east side of the Chao Phraya River valley, between the Lopburi River and Pa Sak Rivers. Thirty percent of the area of the province, including most of Tha Wung district, the southwestern parts of Mueang Lopburi and Ban Mi districts are a very low alluvial plain. The other 70 percent is mixed plains and hills, with the Phetchabun Mountains forming the eastern boundary of the province towards the Khorat Plateau. The total forest area is or 14.8 percent of provincial area.
Wildlife sanctuary There is one wildlife sanctuary in region 1 (Saraburi branch) of Thailand's protected areas. Sap Langka Wildlife Sanctuary,
Climate Lopburi province has a tropical savanna climate (Köppen climate classification category Aw). Winters are dry and warm. Temperatures rise until May. Monsoon season runs from May through October, with heavy rain and somewhat cooler temperatures during the day, although nights remain warm. The maximum temperature is 41.4 °C (106.5 °F) in April and the lowest temperature is 10.2 °C (50.4 °F) in December. The highest average temperature is 36.8 °C (98.2 °F) and the minimum average temperature is 20.6 °C (69.1 °F). Annual average rainfall is 1,125 millimetres. The mean number of rainy days in September is 17.6. Maximum daily rainfall is 203.4 millimetres in October.
Symbols
The provincial seal shows Vishnu in front of the Khmer temple Phra Prang Sam Yod, designed in the 1940s. In 2026, Thai Government designed a new provincial seal by replacing an image of the god Vishnu with a graphic of the Monument of King Narai which is situated in Lopburi city.Determination of the Official Emblem Image of Lop Buri Province, Ministry of Interior
The escutcheon of Lopburi shows Vishnu and in the background Phra Prang Sam Yod, the "Sanctuary with the Three Towers". It refers to King Narai who in 1664 fortified the city to be used as an alternative capital when Ayutthaya was threatened by a Dutch naval blockade.